1. The Smithsonian Institution has never used the Book of Mormon in
any way as a scientific guide. Smithsonian archeologists see no direct connection between
the archeology of the New World and the subject matter of the book.

2. The physical type of the American Indian is basically Mongoloid,
being most closely related to that of the peoples of eastern. central, and northeastern
Asia. Archeological evidence indicates that the ancestors of the present Indians cane into
the New World - probably over a land bridge known to have existed in the Being Strait
region during the last Ice Age - in a continuing series of small migrations beginning from
about 25,000 to 30,000 years ago.

3. Present evidence indicates that the first people to reach this
continent from the East were the Norsemen who briefly visited the northeastern part of
North America around A.D. 1000 and then settled in Greenland. There is nothing to show
that they reached Mexico or Central America.

4. One of the main lines of evidence supporting the scientific
finding that contacts with Old World civilizations if indeed they occurred at all, were of
very little significance for the development of American Indian civilizations, is the fact
that none of the principal Old World domesticated food plants or animals (except the dog)
occurred in the New World in pre-Columbian times. American Indians had no wheat, barley,
oats, millet, rice, cattle, pigs, chickens, horses, donkeys, camels before 1492. (Camels
and horses were in the Americas, along with the bison, mammoth, and mastodon, but all
these animals became extinct around 10,000 B.C. at the time when the early big game
hunters spread across the Americas.)

5. Iron, steel, glass, and silk were not used in the New World before
1492 (except for occasional use of unsmelted meteoric iron). Native copper was worked in
various locations in pre-Columbian times, but true metallurgy was limited to southern
Mexico and the Andean region, where its occurrence in late prehistoric times involved
gold, silver, copper, and their alloys, but not iron.

6. There is a possibility that the spread of cultural traits across
the Pacific to Mesoamerica and the northwestern coast of South America began several
hundred years before the Christian era. However, any such inter-hemispheric contacts
appear to have been the results of accidental voyages originating in eastern and southern
Asia. It is by no means certain that even such contacts occurred; certainly there were no
contacts with the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, or other peoples of Western Asian and the
Near East.

7. No reputable Egyptologist or other specialist on Old World
archeology, and no expert on New World prehistory, has discovered or confirmed any
relationship between archeological remains in Mexico and archeological remains in Egypt.

8. Reports of findings of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, and other Old
World writings in the New World in pre-Columbian contexts have frequently appeared in
newspapers, magazines, and sensational books. None of these claims has stood up to
examination by reputable scholars. No inscriptions using Old World forms of writing have
been shown to have occurred in any part of the Americas before 1492 except for a few Norse
rune stones which have been found in Greenland.